🎙️ I co-hosted this week's edition of Under the Number with Brent Peus Jr.!

We riffed on outdoor action sports and the trends we are seeing in the industry before sitting down with Carter Westfall, CEO and co-founder of Natural Selection Tour.

We covered a lot of ground: the X Games, the Snow League, the World Surf League, and how NST is counter-positioned against all of them.

A great listen for anyone thinking about how value actually accrues in emerging sports.

Carter is a Princeton football alum, which made the conversation that much better!

In the summer of 2021, I was at Princeton preparing for my junior football season, after having taken a gap year and returned to a campus that, like most of the country, was adjusting to a post-COVID world.

On July 1 of that year, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in NCAA v. Alston, overturning a century-plus of amateurism precedent and effectively legalizing what would, over the following years, descend into the so-called “Wild West” of Name, Image, and Likeness.

For me and many others in college, the line between pre- and post-COVID collapsed into pre- and post-NIL. But for an FCS player at a small Ivy League institution in the first two years of legal NIL, those lines were the same in the only sense that mattered – at the end of my collegiate career I had earned exactly zero dollars.

Following my senior year I had exhausted all of my eligibility and was forced to declare for the NFL Draft instead of entering the transfer portal. I signed as an UDFA with the LA Rams to a three-year, $2.7M contract at 22 years old. My signing bonus was a mere $1,000, and when I entered the building as the lowest man on the totem pole, I quickly found out just how little of that I was guaranteed (hint: $0).

Cut for medical during OTAs, I spent the next year scrapping and clawing my way back to the NFL through 3 surgeries in 5 months, eventually landing with the Denver Broncos (for like 5 seconds), where I again was cut.

For more of my story ↓↓↓

My total career earnings? $1500, pre-tax. If I would have grad-transferred to even a mid-P4 program, I would have commanded $100k+ in NIL for a single year of work.

As unfortunate as that was for my bank account, thankfully, my story with collegiate athletics didn’t end there. Although the flame of a professional career was snuffed out almost as quickly as it was lit, I did not go gently into that good night.

Four years later in the fall of 2025, I would pitch all thirteen FCS conference commissioners on a proposal to privatize the FCS Playoffs. A pretty surreal moment for a former FCS football player. But for that proposal to make any sense whatsoever, you must first understand everything about college athletics.

And because there is a lot to know, I’m going to split it into four essay:

Part I: The complete history and context of the NCAA. Think of this as INPUTS.

Part II: The effect of Part I — where we are today. Think of this as OUTPUTS.

Part III: The deeper patterns shaping the NCAA. Think of this as INTERPRETATION.

Part IV: The striking parallel to the Catholic Church. Think of this as ANALOGY.

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For six essays I have named patterns and demonstrated how they recur across domains, but over the next four I will reverse the logic.

I will take a single domain and demonstrate how every pattern this publication has named so far simultaneously converges and finds their fullness in the NCAA.

I have spent the last two years embedded inside this institution, structuring transactions, advising stakeholders, mapping the structural constraints of the system, and architecting proposals and investment strategies from the ground up in response to those constraints.

I’ve pitched everyone from ADs and commissioners to President Charlie Baker himself; I’ve spoken with university Presidents, trustees, and NIL boosters.

Out of confidentiality I will not disclose anything that is genuinely proprietary. But what I can offer in this essay is a compression of all of my experience and domain expertise into as surgical a masterclass as possible.

May you learn from years of me banging my head against a wall.

For all of history, athletics functioned as the front door of the American university. Institutions spent disproportionate sums on athletic programs not because they were profitable, but because they produced an enrollment step-change the university could not generate otherwise. This is the Doug Flutie, Deion Sanders, and more recently Fernando Mendoza effect.

March Madness Cinderella runs and BCS appearances reinforced a structural rationale that was historically straightforward: athletic spending was a marketing budget, and the return showed up in tuition revenue.

That rationale is now collapsing. Operational costs are ballooning at every level of the model, the one-two punch of the enrollment cliff and AI is hitting academia hard, and unless you are a P4 or one of the few perennially relevant basketball or football programs, the math no longer works.

The institutional argument that undergirded collegiate athletics for 150-years is now only available to a select elite, and the rug has been pulled in just 5 years.

This is the awkward truth: collegiate athletic departments run on subsidy.

Institutional support, student fees, and donations have covered the operational deficits for their entire existence. They are cost, not profit, centers, and operate as the inversion of traditional sports franchise models. This subsidy model exists nowhere else in the global sports industry.

Every other commercial sport has, over the course of its development, transitioned from amateur-play to a professional model, making the jump into self-sustaining operations through sophisticated commercial, capital, and governance strategies.

And make no mistake about it, the inability for the American collegiate model to adapt to its newfound commercial realities has in no way shielded it from the ethical deliberations that come knocking the second amateurism compounded into billions.

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To see how unusual the model is, it helps to look at three historical parallels that each offer a unique and relevant insight regarding amateur-to-pro commercial maturity:

1) English Premier League:

Sound familiar?

2) Time from formation to inflection:

And the levers have always been the same: Centralized media rights; Breakaways; Revenue sharing; Private capital and ownership; Governance formation; Franchise models; Mergers; Corporate league office builds; Labor disputes; Superstars; Digital and global monetization.

Commercial inflection is, in every case, drip-drip-drip, and then all at once – which leads me to my final framework.

3) Theory of “Punctuated Equilibrium”:

Long stretches of equilibrium are punctuated by brief, intense periods of structural reordering, after which a new equilibrium is established that looks fundamentally different from the prior one (think: Cambrian explosion).

Applied to the 400-year history of American higher education, the punctuation points are visible.

1636 – 1869: The first American universities were founded in the mid-1600s, but for the first 270 years, there were no intercollegiate sports.

Punctuation #1, 1869 – 1939 (70 years): In the year 1869, the first ever intercollegiate football game was played between my alma mater, Princeton, and Rutgers. What followed is a rapid period of change – the founding of the NCAA (1906), and the first NCAAM tournament (1939).

Each period of disruption is followed by an equally violent period of commercialization.

1939 – 1972: The rise of radio/TV led to legacy broadcasters signing their first national collegiate sporting rights deals, and scale became inevitable.

Punctuation #2, 1972 – 1984 (12 years): Many legal and regulatory decisions that still affect us today – Title IX, the split into Division I-III, and in 1984, a Supreme Court antitrust ruling that granted schools the ability to pool, control, and commercialize their own media rights collectively, functionally created the modern NCAA.

1984 – 2021: Rapid commercialization again followed – conferences secured mega-media deals, March Madness, the BCS, and later the CFP all commercialized at a scale never before seen, all the while maintaining the facade that this was still an amateur's enterprise. And like any capitalist marketplace, power, prestige, and wealth accrued to the few.

Punctuation #3, 2021 – Present (5 years): the “Wild West” era – NIL + transfer portal (2021), mass conference realignment (2023), House vs. NCAA + CFP expansion (2024), revenue-sharing, NCAAM expansion, Unions (?), + the entrance of private equity (2025+).

We are five years into a punctuation that historical analog suggests will usher in a new equilibrium. History tells me that what will follow is a period of rapid commercialization, the likes of which we have never before seen. A look at the macro backdrop confirms this intuition.

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Sports as an asset class:

Over the last decade, a consensus has formed across institutional capital: sports properties are among the most defensible, value appreciating, and non-market-correlated assets in the modern economy.

This thesis is well-documented, but here are a few quick reasons franchise valuations outpaced the S&P 500 for 20+ years:

Recognizing all of this simultaneously, the big five American leagues opened their doors, transforming what was once a billionaire trophy asset to an institutional investment category.

The point: College athletics sits inside every single one of these tailwinds.

The NCAA benefits from the same cord-cutting dynamics, commands the same scarce live inventory premium, and is subject to the same experiential economy forces converting game days into full commercial ecosystems.

These same tailwinds attract the same private capital that has flowed into professional leagues for the same structural reasons: monopolistic structures, brand durability, and audience loyalty that is genuinely non-replicable.

The anti-AI bet, the K-shaped economy, the generational wealth transfer – all of it. College athletics sits at the center of identity for hundreds of millions, and by every structural measure used to evaluate sports as an asset class, collegiate athletics has it in spades.

But the category-defining argument for college is that it captures more than just these tailwinds.

College layers on top of this macro picture something that no professional franchise has ever been able to manufacture: genuine intergenerational institutional belonging.

The alumni of Notre Dame, Michigan, and Alabama lived their fandom. Their time on campus was an embodied practice – sitting in those stadiums during the most formative years of their life (18-22) as students, donating to their universities as alumni, and passing it down to their children the way families pass down surnames.

The intergenerational loyalty embedded in collegiate athletics is the feature of the product. When professional leagues sell entertainment, college athletics sells identity, belonging, and nostalgia.

And the numbers reflect this reality. We know that sports rights as a percentage of total TV revenues now sit at 14%, up from 8% a decade ago. But when you zoom in, the concentration is even more striking: the NFL, college football, and the NBA captured 86.8% of total industry broadcast revenues, and together accounted for nearly all broadcast revenue growth from 2023 to 2025. While MLB’s three-year broadcast revenue CAGR sits below 0.5%, college football’s is above 24%.

The palpable tension being held is that college football is priced like one of the most valuable institutional media assets there is, but it still sits inside an institutional system built for amateurism, education, and the nonprofit mission.

The structural consolidation of media dollars around the NFL, CFB, and the NBA is cause for concern because the NCAA is being forced to confront the same questions that every major professional league has spent the last 50+ years answering: who governs the product, who owns the economics, how does labor participate, and what is the institution ultimately designed to be.

Which brings us to the relative present, where just like the Ides of March, the empire arrives at the moment of its naming.

The problem at the heart of collegiate athletics is that the core economics supporting the system are fragmented across too many stakeholders.

Universities have farmed out all of their rights to outside third-parties, and now the entire value capture system functions as a patchwork.

Each party owns their own slice of the rights universe, operates on a different timeline, carries their own incentive structure, and none of them have the authority, visibility, or commercial mandate to coordinate investment, negotiate at scale, or operate the whole as a unified system.

Value is lost because it is trapped in silos that were never designed to work together, across six key rights categories:

1) Media rights sit at each conference. They are structurally mispriced across the whole of the association because rights are fragmented across dozens of conferences:

If you were to aggregate and sell all of these media rights across the entire FBS (currently ~$4B) as a singular unified product (like the NFL), there would be a 3x repricing unlock, and the same goes for the FCS too.

This is the core structural problem (alongside uncoordinated scheduling) that Super League proposals like Project Rudy attempt to solve for, and I see why they start here. Football is the only media asset valuable enough that, if treated with proper bundling care, could plausibly fund the growing deficits across the broader college athletics ecosystem.

But more than fragmentation, shoulder programming is almost non-existent, content is under-produced, and the conferences themselves lack the staff, capital, expertise, and creative capacity to operate as modern content businesses.

2) Commercial rights sit with the multimedia rights holders (Learfield, Playfly). The economic model of these MMRs systematically suppresses the value of these rights because they sell existing inventory against a minimum revenue guarantee (MRG) and split the upside.

Example: Playfly will pay Texas A&M $515M over 15 years (~$34M/year), guaranteed. In exchange for these rights, Playfly has the right to sell sponsorships across all of Texas A&M's athletics inventory. Playfly hopes that they will sell >$34M in sponsorship, where they will then split the upside.

Playfly is likely to hit this number, and this is probably a good deal for both parties in this case – guaranteed stability for A&M, upside for Playfly – but can the same be said for a non-Tier 1 institution? The answer is no, and the reason is because the incentives do not align.

If you are a mid-major, the scope of your engagement with an MMR partner likely is in the low millions of dollars, your inventory is being sold by a 22-year old fresh college grad who may or may not exceed the MRG, and your contract relies on broad, outdated definitions of "multimedia rights," leaving major commercial categories unprotected, under-monetized, or ambiguously assigned.

The first-order opportunity is rights-reclamation by the schools combined with new-inventory creation. This is what Clemson and others are doing by bringing their MMR back in-house, but more on this later.

The second-order opportunity is that MMRs as a category are vulnerable to replacement. An internal buildout of the same competency, the standard Hollywood commissioning agency structure, or a private equity firm with an in-house operating arm can all sit in the seat the MMR currently occupies and thrive because the incentive structures are different.

3) Real estate rights sit at the university. Facilities (arenas, stadiums, adjacent spaces) across college campuses are chronically under-renovated and under-utilized, causing them to structurally underperform as commercial assets.

Six football and twenty basketball games a year are not enough to move the commercial needle when you could be bringing in concerts, corporate events, youth-sports tournaments, and the rest of the live-experience inventory that fills professional venues across the country. Increasing utilization from 50 to 100 nights a year is step one.

But in order to optimize those 100+ nights a year, the valuable real estate these universities sit on must be premium-ized – VIP, club spaces, hospitality zones, high-touch and high-dollar experiences, and mixed-use development around the venue are all key to driving long-term growth.

This is why we’ve seen the surge of college-focused real estate projects pop up, as well as track the launch of funds and companies like Seregh and ALUM.

A deal that I worked on at a mid-major institution with a premier basketball program proves this point. This university was located in a Tier 3 city, their basketball arena was right in the heart of that city, they sold out every game, and their title sponsor was paying them $200k/year.

But, the arena looked like it hadn't been renovated since the 1990s, they were activating less than 50 times a year, and they weren’t even charging for women’s basketball or volleyball.

The clear low-hanging fruit opportunity in this case was to fund a full renovation, control the operations, increase the utilization of the arena, and when that title sponsorship expires in 2028, it would be repriced at 5x the current rate, virtually underwriting the entire investment alone.

4) Operational rights are scattered. Athletic departments rely on dozens of disconnected vendors, outdated contracts, and unintegrated systems, creating unnecessary costs and operational inefficiencies. Teamworks is the 800-lb gorilla in the room, and no single school has the scale or leverage to negotiate better terms or build an integrated operating stack on its own.

The opportunity, again, is aggregation. If you pull the operational stack of multiple schools onto a common platform and integrate AI, their collective scale will produce better pricing, higher quality, and greater leverage against every vendor in the stack, and the self-reinforcing flywheel becomes straightforward.

5) NIL rights sit nowhere coherent. They are scattered across collectives, boosters, agents, and ad hoc agreements, with little standardization of terms, process, or market value.

But worse, the structural injustice is plain on its face: P4 conferences routinely poach G6 and FCS athletes and coaches, and the originating school receives zero economic participation in the value of the talent it developed.

Make no mistake about it, college athletics has its own promotion-relegation system. It may not be one of teams, but it certainly is one of talent.

This should not be a surprise to us, considering in every sports league talent always consolidates at the top, but in those cases (European soccer) there are always economic participation mechanisms (transfer fees) that allow the system to flourish.

The structural answer, then, is a centralized NIL platform with standardized contracts that include transfer fees and buyout clauses. When a Harvard QB transfers to TCU, Harvard should receive a transfer fee just like AS Monaco was awarded €180M when it sold Mbappe to PSG.

Such a structure converts talent mobility from a bottomless pit of deficit into an ever-sustainable ancillary revenue stream, creates the economic basis for a coherent FCS-to-FBS development pipeline, and it simultaneously proactively defines the commercial relationship between the two levels of play.

6) New IP rights also sit nowhere. Universities rarely generate new commercial properties because doing so requires capital, creative capability, and operational bandwidth they simply do not possess. As a result, the highest-upside opportunities in college athletics (new events, media franchises, experiential platforms, and standalone businesses) never materialize, leaving schools trapped selling only legacy inventory.

The solution across all six rights categories is always the same: aggregation and consolidation. Replacing fragmentation and under-commercialization with scale is the framework that emerges once you understand the structural constraints of the system.

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The schools and conferences making serious progress here are worth naming directly, because the patterns they follow are repeatable.

At the conference level, three operating models emerge.

The Big 12, under Commissioner Brett Yormark, took on a private credit deal with RedBird and CAS. While most member schools are actively rejecting the credit line, it is clear that Yormark wanted the dry powder at the conference level in order to continue executing his innovative commercial playbook – Big 12 Pro Days at AT&T Stadium, a 15% stake in the Player's Era tournament, and a conference-wide partnership with Venmo.

The portfolio of new IP and commercial relationships he has assembled in two years is the most aggressive operating record of any conference in college athletics. He is the closest thing to a venture-builder in the system, and the Big 12 is the closest thing to a venture-backed company.

The American Conference, under Commissioner Tim Pernetti, stood up RISE Ventures as its commercial operating arm, with Bryan Calka serving as Chief Commercial Officer. SOAR the Eagle is now the conference mascot, and the conference is aggressively building.

If a Super League comes to fruition, the Big Ten and SEC merge, or there generally manifests a formal hierarchy of play, I would bet on Tim and the American to be the home of Tier 2 college football, and depending on what happens to the ACC, even potentially acquire those future displaced programs.

The Atlantic Sun Conference (ASUN), under Commissioner Jeff Bacon, and the United Athletic Conference (UAC) just announced the formation of Unisun Sports, a joint venture that aggregates assets, integrates shared infrastructure, and builds new revenue streams across both conferences.

Think of this as a HoldCo. that sits on top of two conferences in which Jeff Bacon is the Chairman. Jeff can now take two media rights deals out to market simultaneously and, in theory, the shared commercial infrastructure could scale across other commercial categories, including sponsorships, operations, and new IP.

At the school level, three programs are operating with the right posture.

Clemson, in 2024, stood up Clemson Ventures. The first-mover in the space, their decision was a sharp departure from the prevailing model: in-house > MMR. They hired a former Atlanta Hawks executive as its CEO, and doubled commercial revenue YoY.

Clemson Ventures is the template for what an in-house commercial structure looks like when it is properly capitalized, mandated, staffed, and executed. Everyone is copying the Clemson model.

Michigan State hired former Georgia Tech AD J Batt, stood up Spartan Ventures, and took on outside donor capital (a 10% stake). Batt is one of the most commercial-forward ADs in the country, and his structural thinking is right.

However, a few trustees have pushed back on this ambiguous equity stake from the donor. Some of that pushback is institutional anxiety about the speed of the changes; some of it is a legitimate question about how this kind of structure interacts with the university's nonprofit governance. The jury is still out, but the thinking is correct.

Boise State sits atop the G6 and has stood up its own version of an outside LLC.

The problem Boise faces is that they will naturally plateau around ~$30-40M in commercial revenue because the conference they are in (Mountain West → Pac-12) limits their ability to capture high-value media dollars, plus their local market is small.

This $30M plateau translates to about 40% of their operating costs, creating a perpetual funding gap. The only way to break through this structural commercial ceiling is to jump up to a better conference and command more media dollars, or to build a robust mixed-use real estate development that prints cash for the next 100 years.

Boise will need money to execute either, and their AD agrees.

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It is worth pausing on why the outside LLC is structurally critical in the first place. A university is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and as such is bound by state law, public records requests (FOIAs), procurement systems, salary bands, legal and accreditation constraints, and the culture is organized around mission rather than enterprise.

The incentives will always be such that a dollar in = a dollar out, which is antithetical to capitalism 101 and how one would grow the capitalist enterprise collegiate athletics has become.

An outside operating entity, however, can pay commission and equity to its commercial staff, hire at market rate, move at quicker and more agile speeds, deploy capital, sign vendor contracts without issuing an RFP, and take operational risk that the university itself cannot legally or politically take.

The structural separation of the mission from the commercial enterprise is necessary for commercial sustainability at this moment in time.

Not to mention, if private equity (which we will get to in Part II) wants to do any sort of financing (credit or equity), the mechanism by which that financing takes place must be inside one of these outside commercial entities so that it is free from everything non-commercial.

Around this, a service ecosystem is flooding the zone, because college is, in 2026, a cash cow.

All of this is completely logical once you understand the structural constraints, needs, and solutions of the system.

If the historical arc is the context and the rights universe is the architecture, the legal and regulatory landscape is the crucible inside which the model will be reshaped over the next decade. The legal foundations rest on two anchor points.

1) The Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961 enabled sports leagues to bundle and sell collective television rights without running afoul of antitrust law, a structure that quietly made every American professional league commercially viable.

2) The 1984 Supreme Court ruling in NCAA v. Board of Regents held that the NCAA's centralized control of football television rights violated the Sherman Act and enabled conferences to control and commercialize their own media rights collectively.

Those two rulings, taken together, created the scaffolding inside which every subsequent commercial decision has been made, and are also what is behind the current legal realities that are in the process of being redrawn.

House, Carter, and Hubbard v. NCAA established the settlement framework under which a $2B+/year expense just got added to the entire association’s P&L – 10 years of $280M/year in back pay for the NCAA + up to $20.5M/year in revenue shared directly with athletes.

Title IX implications shadow every rev-share conversation, the College Sports Commission was established to operate as the clearing house and market regulator of NIL payments, and around all of this, the regulatory and lobbying landscape is moving in parallel.

The push for federal antitrust exemption is led by figures like Cody Campbell’s "Saving College Sports" and the backers of Project Rudy because these proposals depend on obtaining an exemption from the 1961 SBA.

In Congress, the SCORE Act, which just again got pulled from the House floor, and the SAFE Act represent competing legislative theories about how to structure athlete employment, transfer rules, and NIL governance at the federal level. Trump’s Executive Order on collegiate athletics added another layer to the federalization question without resolving the underlying conflicts.

But to clear the noise for you, the three legal issues that matter the most, as articulated by President Baker himself, are antitrust, state preemption, and employment status.

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Antitrust underpins everything. Every restriction the NCAA places on its athletes or collectives, coordinated salary cap, or limit on transfer eligibility faces an antitrust challenge that the institution will likely lose unless Congress grants explicit exemption. The institutional preference for antitrust exemption is rational, but the political path to that exemption is incredibly difficult.

State preemption addresses a core paradox: collegiate athletics is inherently a national commercial operation, but legal permissions are still largely written state-by-state. There are really two preemption frameworks at play:

1) Congressional preemption where Congress passes a federal law that expressly says it overrides conflicting state NIL laws.

2) Executive preemption where Trump’s April 2026 executive order directs federal agencies and the AG to use grant/contract oversight to challenge conflicting state laws, thereby pressuring schools, governing bodies, and Congress toward one national framework around NIL/pay-for-play, revenue sharing, transfers, eligibility, athlete medical care, and agent regulation.

Either way, the NCAA needs this to land because they can’t have Texas, Florida, California, and others undermining their authority.

Employment status will bring with it all of the consequences that this designation carries: wage law, collective bargaining rights, workers' compensation, tax treatment, and immigration status for international athletes. Until this problem is answered, the structural ambiguity will continue to distort every commercial decision in the sector.

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Inside this same legal crucible sit a set of boundary violations that, taken together, signal that the institution's coherence is beginning to fail.

The transfer portal has been extending eligibility from 4 to 5 years and, in some cases, beyond. Athletes are suing to keep playing, claiming their earning potential is being suppressed, and in response the NCAA has pivoted to a 5-years-to-play-5-seasons model, bounded by age restrictions.

Prediction markets are the atom bomb of integrity in collegiate athletics. Offering newly wealthy 18-22 year old athletes the opportunity to make a deterministic play being traded on severely threatens the integrity of the game in a way that even the traditional sports betting markets never allowed for. Somehow we have succeeded in making a missed three-pointer or interception a priceable event.

Professional basketball players are now trying to return to college because NIL and revenue sharing have changed the economic logic of amateurism. Former international, G-League, NBA Draft selections are all testing the boundary between college and professional basketball. The NCAA is still drawing a formal line at athletes who signed NBA contracts, but the line is under legal and commercial pressure because the financial calculus has flipped.

The clearest violation of the original student-athlete mandate is the presence of an athlete who has previously played professionally for compensation.

Zooming in on employment, the clearest way to understand where college athletics sits right now is to look at the two labor frameworks that have actually worked elsewhere, and to recognize that they work for opposite reasons.

The NFL is sharing approximately 48.5% of revenues with players, this is the product of a union with genuine bargaining power, a CBA, and a legal architecture that ties the wage floor to a fixed percentage of defined gross revenues. This is how all major American leagues have solved the labor equation.

The IPL, by contrast, pays players a fraction (~20%) of total BCCI revenue, and is structured through the absence of negotiation. The BCCI functions as a central authority that sets the salary cap, controls the central revenue pool before distributing it to franchises, and faces no collective labor challenge from a player association with real legal standing.

Players earn well in absolute terms, particularly the stars, but they receive a structurally suppressed share of total revenue precisely because there is no union counterparty to force a higher split.

Both the NFL and IPL models solve for the same problem, but arrive at different numbers through opposite mechanisms. As far as I see it, these are the two routes the NCAA can go down. A natural gravitation towards the IPL model makes sense until the labor union counterparty exists, and although Athletes.org and OneTeam Partners seem to be the two most credible candidates for the role, this will be difficult to get over the line.

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Regarding the flipped labor economics dynamic of college: for the entirety of professional football's history, the NFL has been the only meaningful buyer of labor, which meant it could pay players less than their labor was worth, because players had nowhere else to go.

The NFL eventually relinquished some of that power under threat of strike, locking players into a roughly 50/50 share of revenue through their CBA, and the collective media and distribution mechanisms are now the built-in structures that make the NFL a disciplined buyer.

But now NIL has created a second buyer, and this one is irrational. College football operates on open auction with no ceiling and no floor. No program has any structural incentive to restrain the bidding because talent is a zero-sum game – every player one program acquires is unavailable to every other.

When a market contains one disciplined buyer and one undisciplined buyer, the disciplined buyer loses its labor cost advantage over time, because the undisciplined buyer changes the incentive calculation for every player sitting on the boundary between the two markets.

In other words, the labor market has evolved from a monopsony to a duopsony.

Thank you to my thought partner and fellow Princeton alum, Ray Ryan, for putting John Vrooman’s economic work, as well as Chuck Klosterman’s book Football on my radar to further this analysis.

To ground this theory of labor economics in lived experience: the NFL rookie minimum is roughly $885K, scheduled to increase to roughly $1M by 2030, but it applies only to the 53-man active roster who plays in all 17 regular season games. Practice squad players make roughly $220K. UDFA’s like me sign three-year contracts that look big on paper but pay nothing guaranteed.

A teammate of mine at Princeton was a sixth-round pick to the Cincinnati Bengals and signed with a $180k bonus. Like me, he earned zero NIL dollars during his collegiate career. Had he instead grad-transferred, his NIL value as a FCS All-American with a national draft profile would have been $1M+.

For the vast majority of players who are not first-round picks, the financial incentive to remain in college is already more attractive than entering the draft. The duopsony is already tipping toward the undisciplined buyer at every tier of the market below the top.

There is one further structural problem. The NFLPA that is supposed to correct the rookie wage distortion in 2030 has internal incentives to preserve it. Veteran players control union leadership, and veteran players benefit from voting for measures that escalate their compensation while keeping rookies flat. This dates back to Sam Bradford's six-year, $78M fully guaranteed rookie contract as the first overall pick in 2010.

Who bears the cost of developing professional football players, and who captures the value of their labor?

The NFL's disciplined structure was built for a world in which it faced no competition for labor at the margin, but unfortunately for Roger Goodell, that world no longer exists.

The history of the NCAA is complicated, multivariable, and unlike any system I have ever studied before. But by understanding what happened, how we got here, and the context that produced it, we are now equipped to read what those inputs are producing in real time.

Part II, 🧭 ATC_008, will map the outputs: the institutional structures, the capital flows, the operational shifts, and the strategic moves emerging from everything covered above.

From there, Part III applies the structural pattern lens in order to interpret these outputs, and Part IV finds their fullness in a cross-domain pattern resonance with the Catholic Church.

The goal across these next four essays is a revived and deeper understanding of the patterns shaping the NCAA.

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